More Home-Office Thrills

Other principals still working from home have had an interesting time running AutoCAD which using our VPN access. Of course, it's because the Profile they are using has many network drive reference folders and that takes a lot of time over a VPN. Loading the active drawing and several Xrefs is also a time-eater. I reset those folder references to a local drive (a 1TB, 7200rpm, Seagate that had been external).

Not that I'm free of any hiccups. The ex-CAD Manager had recently saved background updates on a project in AutoCAD 2010 format and me normally running version 2008 had to shift gears. That meant closing 2008 and opening 2010 which resulted in an annoying long wait for all the folder references to take effect. Once done I exported that Profile as backup and started modifying it to local folder references making separate incremental backups. I advised my co-principals to make backups as well, not that they'll actually do it. Those changes got AutoCAD 2010 working faster albeit with what amount to a near duplication of the Menu Bar headers.

Tried again to do a disk drive upgrade with the Western Digital specific Acronis software - caused a BSOD result due to the snapman.sys file. It's apparently a known problem going back to mid-2009 without a solution. Thus, I say screw Western Digital; never will buy another their hard drives. Seagate's version works fine.

The 2nd Dell 390 also has a single 80GB drive but accessing the machine through any of the usernames has been fruitless even when using boot CD methods and various software. I pulled the 80GB WD drive and installed the two 320GB WD drives. Setting up the motherboard to do a RAID 1 setup was interesting as it apparently is not a true RAID. I only found that out after 1)installing FreeDOS and Ubuntu 10.4 LTS only to find out that the Intel RAID setup wipes out the data. Okay, start over. After checking out a few things online, I found that Winddows wants to be the first OS on the drives when using the Intel RAID-1 setup. I installed Win7 64-bit Ultimate.

All 8GB of ram the max allowed by the machine was acknowledged by Win7. Installed Dataram's RAMDisk so I could have a 512MB ram disk where temp files for certain programs would reside, I can dump PDF files to check before sending to paper and a drop spot for download files before committing them to drive storage.

Not sure yet what to do with my old 933Mhz P3 box. It has a 500GB PATA drive with WinXP-SP3, SCSI CD writer and an 8GB SCSI drive. A spare 250GB PATA drive sits unused as well as a 64GB and a 40GB. Just not sure where to let this thing fit in my grand tech scheme.

September work activity when fine and I progressed well on a few projects getting them completed. Only two remain, one with documentation on HVAC commissioning for LEED uploads and another awaiting architectural update plans to confirm changes. HVAC revisions are done and I just need to confirm they align with the arch'l plans.

With the end of September I finished my commitment to continue working with the old company for two months at half-pay for half-time work. I agreed with the Engineer-of-Record on the two projects that I'd stick with them to reach the next milestone but not beyond that point.

Had one episode of the UPS signing during an overnight power outage. Didn't matter since I had powered down all the gear but it was nice to know the beast worked as advertised.

I started a job search based on choosing potential employers by their distance from my home. The closest is only a couple miles away but one of the partners was once a coworker whose design on project I had to fix when he left my old company. Not a good option.

I sent off a resume to a company about eight miles away where I knew a few people and one that had advertised in the local ASHRAE newsletter looking for mech design staff. That happened on a Wednesday eve. The next Tuesday I got a call from a partner for a telephone interview. On the following Thursday I got any email offering a time for an interview the following Monday which I accepted.

The interview process is a bit of a freak-out thing for me since I've not done a personal one for so many years. I kept my resume to two pages so I guess I did that part correctly with length and format. I've been on corporate interviews so I imagine the personal version won't be too much different. Just got to remind myself to relax and allow a natural flow of exchange between the interviewers and me. I expect an offer but the size of it will be interesting to see.